Seek and Ye Shall Google-Bing-Yahoo!

20 years ago this would have simply been a string of pronouncable syllables to describe the noise your furnace makes when it first starts up in the fall. These days, it represents 3 of the top 4 places people go to search for information the Internet, according to The Nielsen Company. The 4th by the way is Facebook: Not going there, can’t make me; at least not for this article.

In order of appearance on the scene, Yahoo! was first. 1994 saw “Jerry and David’s World Wide Web” renamed “Yahoo!” Jerry and David were Jerry Yang and David Filo, two Stanford Electrical Engineering graduate students. Following on the heels of a great idea, Microsoft introduced MSN, the Microsoft Network. Google began as a research project for Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1996. The now mega-popular domain wasn’t registered until 1997. More recently, Microsoft has unveiled Bing to take its place as it’s search offering.

Yahoo! seems very directed at the personal web user, offering them a dashboard of favorite sites and information portals. Although, Google is offering some similar features through iGoogle. It has always been known as THE search engine, offering a variety of language and search tools to facilitate getting to the information you want quickly and effectively. Bing, the new kid on the block is attempting to be the belle of the ball by offering more user-friendly drill down tools to avoid having to wade though pages and pages of what you don’t want. All are making moves in the direction of allowing you to customize your search experience.

Me? I’m still a Google girl. That said, 20 years ago, I’d say I was a Yellow Pages girl. So, there’s always hope for change. I use a variety of search engines to find what I need, but Google will always be my first stop. Do you like one of the others better? Tell me why and I'll post it here.

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